Developers Rinnegatamante and Bythos have released an update to the Dreamcast emulator for PS Vita, Flycast (based on Flyinghead’s Dreamcast emulator of the same name). This new release 1.1 is mostly keeping up to date with the original Flycast codebase. But if you haven’t updated since 1.0, know that since 1.03, the emulator has 6MB extra Ram to play with.

What is Flycast for PS Vita

Flycast is a multi-platform Sega Dreamcast, Naomi, Naomi 2, and Atomiswave emulator derived from reicast.

This PS Vita Port is a fork made by Rinnegatamante and Bythos.

With some optimizations, some games reach a playable state, such as Sonic Adventure and Shenmue being showcased in the videos below. The compatibility list currently gives about 50% of tested games as playable or better, which is pretty great. (Shenmue isn’t considered as playable in the compatibility list, although it does look close from the video)

Among playable games with Flycast Vita are popular titles such as Marvel Vs Capcom 2, Phantasy Star Online, Jet Set Radio, Ikaruga, Skies of Arcadia, Street fighter 3 3rd Strike, Metropolis Street Racer, Resident Evil code Veronica, The house of the Dead 2, Power Stone 2, Sonic Adventure (1 & 2), and many more.

What’s new in Flycast 1.1

From the changelog:

• Downstreamed to latest official Flycast commit. (BoxArts support has been disabled by default. It’s recommended to enable it from emu.cfg solely if you have few roms cause, with a lot of roms, it will cause general instability in the emulator due to mem constraints).
• Added Fast GDRom Load option. (Faster loading times in games but may cause issues in some games).

Download FlyCast, Dreamcast Emulator for PS Vita

You can download Flycast from the developer’s github here.

Installation Process

• Install kubridge and FdFix by copying kubridge.skprx and fd_fix.skprx to your taiHEN plugins folder (usually ux0:tai) and adding two entries to your config.txt under *KERNEL. [NOTE: You need to update kubridge if you had it already installed for previously released Android ports].
• Install libshacccg.suprx, if you don’t have it already, by running this homebrew.
• Install Flycast.vpk using VitaShell.
• (Optional but strongly recommended) Dump your own DC bios and place it inside ux0:data/flycast/data.

Additional tips from the devs

• The emulator seems to memleak (probably related to some issues clearing some cache during emulation) thus causing games to degrade in performances during long runs and eventually even crashing the emulator due to out of memory. We STRONGLY suggest to take savestates often in order to not lose progresses.
• Due to the nature of CHD and CDI dumps (compressed), GDI dumps must be preferred for best performances.
• It’s recommended to use PAL dumps and to stick to TV Composite option for the Cable option. This will make games to run with 25 fps/50 fps as target (Like EU TVs at the time) instead of 30 fps/60 fps. Due to the lower fps target, games will run smoother with these settings.
• The new kubridge requires enso. If you don’t have it, install it. It also has been tested only on 3.60 and 3.65 fw.
• Stick to as low amount of plugins as possible. kubridge requires a lot of memory to work as it should for Flycast which means having a lot of plugins can make it fail to allocate memory and thus causing a crash at boot of the emu.​

The developers share more tips and tweaks to get the best out of the emulator, over at this thread on psx-place (you’ll also find an insanely long credits list there, in case you were wondering how many people it takes to help on such a project). Please note that given the nature of the emulated console, you shouldn’t expect perfect emulation.

Source: VitaDB